Robert Mish: ”The phone calls were ringing so much we could not answer them. We had to just put all our lines on hold so we could service the customers, and our own customers we wanted to service first.

We world come in to open at nine in the morning and there would already be a line out the door and down the block. Sometimes the line was mostly buyers, sometimes there were sellers. We would run out of metal. We would run out of anything. And we would have to divide the line into two lines. We would take the sellers in first, get some product, and sort it before the buyers were let in.

And people were not very discriminating then; they were panicking. By the time it peaked in January 1980, there were people out there who did not even understand free market economics or precious metal economics, they were just buying because it was fashionable or because it was going up forever. Those are more the makings of a bubble, today most people are coming in to sell.”